The head of the preservation group Landmarks Illinois is leaving his post at the end of October.President and Executive Director Jim Peters will move on to consult and teach historic preservation at the University of Illinois at Chicago and other places.Peters joined the group about ten years ago af

That monstrous traffic jam Sunday on the Dan Ryan had one benefit: It pushed me off the expressway and onto Halsted Street, where I passed the Ramova Theater, battered, shuttered, but still holding on.The city owns and wants to redevelop the 82-year-old former 1,500-seat theater near 35th and Halste

All the talk about The High Line in New York City and the planned Bloomingdale Trail on Chicago's North Side brings to mind another potential railroad-to-park conversion in the South Side's Bronzeville community.If only the money and effort existed to actually make it happen.The embankment, overgrow

It's early yet, but the new Rush Medical Center building nearing completion on Ashland Avenue on the south edge of the Eisenhower Expressway is shaping up to be a good-looking building.The 14-story, $654 million addition to the Rush campus cuts a fine figure at street level with all that glass and g

Like any great city, Chicago is always changing. Familiar landmarks are destroyed. Lost Chicago, by David Lowe, is the classic book on our vanished local heritage.But what about those well-remembered Chicago oddities that never made the guidebooks, even when they were around?

Notwithstanding the 20th Century development of "theater in the round"--which often is in the square or oval--Western culture abandoned the circle as a primary theatrical shape some 2200 years ago, when the rising Roman civilization co-opted the waning Greeks.

Renderings were released today for a 3280-foot skyscraper, called Kingdom Tower, planned for the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah near the Red Sea.The skyscraper is designed by Chicago's Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture.

I've posted images of this Chatham neighborhood dry cleaners before. Built in 1959, the cleaners was completed two years after the Russians launched the Sputnik satellite and two years before President John F.